The Griffter

’S Wonderful, ’S Mervelous!

At 72, onetime crooner Merv Griffin has parlayed the $250 million sale of his game shows Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune in 1986 into a billion-dollar empire that encompasses two production companies, a cosmetics business, racing stables, a $20 million Challenger jet, a 127-foot yacht, and eight hotels, including his beloved Beverly Hilton.

The enormous, vaulted-ceilinged guest suite at Merv Griffin's La Quinta ranch in the Coachella Valley near Palm Springs is decorated with antique Moroccan rifles made of silver and ivory, and its floors are inlaid with purple and white marble. White linen draperies flow from the 12-foot-high French windows, which offer a commanding view of a 50-foot-high geyser spouting from the green waters of Lake Merveilleux.

In the morning, desert sunlight floods this room, but by the time I am awakened by it my host has been up for several hours. Each day, at seven a.m., a tray with oatmeal, coffee, and three newspapers is delivered to the 72-year-old Griffin's white-on-white bedroom by his devoted housekeeper, Marylou Martinez. When she arrives, El Capitán—as she calls her boss—is watching Live! With Regis & Kathie Lee on a vast Mitsubishi television and doing the crossword with a black Pentel pen. Then, at around nine, the talk-show icon, horse breeder, hotelier, gentleman rancher, and billionaire moves to a swivel chair beside his lake, where he begins his business calls on a cordless phone.

As I walk across a hibiscus-covered lanai to join Griffin at a glass-topped table shaded by canvas umbrellas painted with pink flamingos and yellow butterflies, Merv fills in the last squares of the Los Angeles Times puzzle. (The clue—10 Across—"The Georgia Peach.") He inks in C-O-B-B. "Ty Cobb!" he says in his smooth baritone, igniting a Benson & Hedges cigarette with a cheap butane lighter. White smoke surrounds his big, handsome head, slightly obscuring the clear, intense blue eyes which for 23 years were as familiar as any celebrity peepers in TV Land.

Griffin's eponymous talk show (which began in 1962) has been off the air for 12 years, but he has not, by any means, drifted away into retirement. Indeed, Merv has managed to engineer a kind of encore virtually unheard of in Hollywood. Perhaps never before in the history of show business has so successful a performer transformed himself into such a powerful and diversified mogul. Worth more than a billion dollars today, Griffin ranks just below David Geffen and George Lucas in the unofficial Hall of Fame of Greater Hollywood Wealth. While his peers—Johnny Carson, Mike Douglas, and Jack Paar—have retreated silently (if very comfortably) into private life, Merv, conspicuously and intrepidly, marches on.

"Retirement to me means death," Griffin tells me the next day during a conversation high above the San Gabriel Mountains aboard his $20 million Challenger 601-3A jet (tail number: 333MG). Our topic is the famous $250 million deal Griffin made in 1986 whereby Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, the extremely popular game shows he had created and produced, were sold to Columbia Pictures, which was then owned by the Coca-Cola Company. At the time of the deal, Griffin was already a wealthy man, having made millions from the ownership of his show and investments including radio stations and real estate. But after Coca-Cola gave him what he likes to call "an American fortune," Merv found himself among an entirely different class of entrepreneurs.

"When Coca-Cola came to me and asked, 'Do you want [the money] in cash?,' I said, 'Sure.' Then you are presented with two choices: you can put it into bonds and live like a maniac—which would probably have killed me by now—or [you can] put it back into the economy."

On September 12, 1988, Griffin established the Griffin Group, a conglomerate of seven different companies. Merv Griffin Hotels, the largest entity, operates eight luxury properties, including the Scottsdale (Arizona) Hilton, the Wickenburg (Arizona) dude ranch, the Blue Moon hotel in Miami Beach, the Givenchy spa in Palm Springs, and the famed Beverly Hilton, where Merv occupies a large penthouse suite which overlooks his newly inaugurated, retro-40s Coconut Club. Merv Griffin Productions, his second- biggest company, is the event-planning organization behind the Golden Globes, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (C.F.D.A.) awards, and many movie premieres. Merv Griffin Entertainment currently has four movies and 10 TV shows in development. The smaller businesses include the Merv Griffin Ranch Company—which breeds and trains racing and Thoroughbred horses and develops real estate—and La Merveille Cie L.L.C., a joint cosmetics venture with his friend Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia.

Of all the various enterprises that he controls, however, it is quite clear that Griffin enjoys the hotel business most. "Hotels are talk shows with beds," he explains blithely as Marylou crosses the lanai bearing his midmorning snack: toasted wedges of pita bread slathered with margarine and honey and a mug of coffee. (He consumes about 10 cups a day.) "It's the same principle. It's the variety of people passing through the doors. It's marketing, the supply and demand, the set design of it all."

As almost any guest at the Beverly Hilton can attest, Griffin runs the sprawling 700-room property like a staged production of Grand Hotel. His presence in the lobby—where he is sometimes spotted with celebrity chums such as Nancy Reagan, Tony Danza, and Robert Loggia—brings exuberant salutes from desk clerks and porters, and, on some occasions, standing ovations from the clientele. He personally designs the doormen's uniforms (black and white stripes with gendarme hats); the carpeting in the ballrooms (a giant rose pattern fabricated in Ireland) is his new passion. He chooses the art (hundreds of framed stills from The Merv Griffin Show, in which the Beverly Hilton's owner is seen with everyone from Henry Aaron to Zsa Zsa Gabor). On weekends, Merv can be found singing at the Coconut Club, an elaborate homage to L.A.'s old Cocoanut Grove, where, in the late 1940s, Griffin got his big break as a crooner with the Freddy Martin Orchestra. And when President Clinton or Vice President Gore stays at the Beverly Hilton, the proprietor always offers a personal greeting—much like the ones he extended to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan and Vice President Agnew on his show.

"You know, when I bought the Beverly Hilton the National Enquirer said, 'Merv Griffin bought the Beverly Hilton hotel so he would have a place to work for the rest of his life,'" Griffin says. "And I thought, I've never heard such a rude thing in my life! But a few months later I was singing there and I thought, Hey! They were right—I bought the Beverly Hilton so I would have a stage for myself to perform on!"

Old friends say that Griffin's reincarnation as a hotelier was simply meant to be: "Merv, I think, genuinely loves the social atmosphere that goes with the business he runs, and he mixes well with the people," observes Johnny Carson, who consented to a rare interview for this profile of his former competitor—only the second he has given since leaving The Tonight Show. "The last time I saw Merv was, I think, at his hotel. I was in there having lunch at Trader Vic's and Merv was in there schmoozin' the people. He likes to work the crowd. He's a good socializer, a good host; he's fun to be around, tells good stories, and I think he also likes the competition that goes with running hotels."

I ask Carson if he thinks Merv's role as a high-profile hotel owner is fitting sublimation for a former talk-show host. "I think so," he says, breaking into a laugh. "I wish I was as smart as Merv. I wish I had the business acumen Merv has. He really knows what he's doing. I've never had that interest in business that Merv does.… Most entertainers don't have a natural bent for business; I think we channel our energies to the performing end. A lot of entertainers I know, you know, who have been involved in business haven't been very successful at it … but he really knows what he's doing, and he has an incredible amount of energy … and a very positive attitude."

Another talk-show personality who thinks Merv knows what he's doing—in both the entertainment and the business worlds—is Rosie O'Donnell, who says that her extremely successful Rosie O'Donnell Show is "totally Merv-inspired."

"[Merv] is somebody to aspire to be like in terms of business sense and the way he has orchestrated his career," O'Donnell says. "You know, people have credited me with what I have created. Well, I didn't create anything. I just copied Merv Griffin. It's that afternoon sit-down-with-your-grandmother kind of programming, where you always felt like after the show they were all going out to dinner at someone's house. The Merv Griffin Show wasn't really about talking over serious issues; there was nothing gut-wrenching, aside from when Totie Fields [O'Donnell's hero] came on after her leg amputation. On the whole, it was just a lighthearted, fun entertainment hour."

O'Donnell also says that Griffin has been a kind of father figure to her. "He has given me a lot of financial advice in terms of investments and how long he thinks I should stay on the air. Merv is a very savvy businessman. I mean, not in a kind of showy way, but you know he knows what he's doing.… I mean, he just has thought it through.…

"There is a limit to how much you can perform and people will take of you," O'Donnell continues. "There is a saturation point, and to have the insight to plan for what it's going to be like when [the performing part of your career] is done, few people have that, you know. People ride the wave of success, and they don't really think what's going to happen after that. And not only did he think it, he made a plan and did the whole thing."

It is one of show business's great ironies that Mervyn Griffin Jr. has ended up as the richest ex–TV personality on earth. After all, for three decades, the Hollywood press devoted endless column inches to a collective obsession with Johnny Carson's salary ($30 million in 1992, his final season). Griffin was always a syndicated sidebar: less noteworthy because he was not—aside from two and a half years on CBS in the late 60s and early 70s—a network star. And yet it was almost always the case that Griffin was more prosperous than Carson. "You see, I never publicized my money," he tells me. "But I always owned my show. That was the difference. Johnny came to me once and asked me how he could make the kind of money I was getting. [Carson denies that he ever went to Griffin for advice.] I said, 'Own your own show, buddy.' Johnny was basically an employee of NBC. He couldn't own Tonight, because NBC created it with Steve Allen. So, today, I'd say Johnny has about $10 million. Remember, in California you give half of your money away in a divorce, and he's had three and the last one got him good. I'd say Johnny's house out in Malibu is probably his main asset."

12:00 Noon

"Hey, did the carpet ever arrive for the check-in? Did you see it? Ain't it gonna look nice? It's my famous leopardskin!" Merv is on the phone with Ronnie Ward, his personal aide, who functions as a driver, traveling companion, telephonist, and equerry—what used to be known as a man Friday. A dry desert breeze ruffles the fronds of the palm trees that surround Lake Merveilleux, and a Judy Garland album plays over stereo speakers concealed by fiberglass "rocks." Ducks float by, and Merv's dogs, Patrick (an Irish setter) and Lobo (half malamute, half wolf), frolic near the water.

Ronnie and Merv go over the morning phone messages: "Oh, Garry Shandling called?" He has invited Merv to appear on his HBO show. Barbara Davis, the Beverly Hills hostess, has telephoned. "She wants me to M.C. this year's Carousel Ball at the Beverly Hilton." (Merv accepts, as he does every year.) Suzanne Somers (just saying "Hi"), Bill Blass (a luncheon invitation), and Larry King, who wants Merv to be on CNN for his Ronald Reagan birthday tribute. (Merv agrees, but later, due to a scheduling conflict, he is unable to make the appearance.)

For the past two years, Griffin has served, along with former secretary of state George Shultz, Rupert Murdoch, Lew Wasserman, and other éminences grises, on the board of the Ronald Reagan library. And in the 10 years since the Reagans returned to the West Coast, Griffin has become a prominent member of what L.A. society calls "the Nancy Set."

"I'd say Nancy and I talk about every day," Griffin confides. "Maybe it wouldn't be like this if it wasn't for the president's illness, but sometimes her spirits get so low. She's locked in that house with him, and she's the only one he knows!"

Frequently, Mrs. Reagan appears at the Beverly Hilton to have lunch with Griffin at his jungle-themed poolside restaurant, called Griff's, and it has become a tradition for them to celebrate their mutual birthday together.

"I'm sure Merv told you we share a birthday," Nancy Reagan says, her voice full of affection, when I call her up to talk about Merv. "We are both July 6 [Cancerians], so we feel like we're blood brothers. You couldn't ask for a better friend.… We've celebrated together at his place. And, of course, for the last four years I haven't been celebrating, but we will have lunch, just the two of us."

On other occasions when they are together—especially at the musical evenings that Marge Everett holds at her Holmby Hills mansion—Merv and Nancy sing duets at a piano, where sometimes they are joined by Johnny Mathis and Tony Danza. Their favorite number is "Our Love Is Here to Stay." "Of course, at a party Merv makes a party!" Mrs. Reagan reports. "He sings, plays the piano—if there's one available. And we've had lots of evenings when he would play the piano and he and I would both sing."

A few weeks later, when I visit Griffin's penthouse suite in the Beverly Hilton, he proudly shows me snapshots of the Reagans taken during a trip they made to La Quinta "just before the announcement about the president's Alzheimer's." In the photos, the president and Mrs. Reagan are sitting in the shade of the umbrellas by Lake Merveilleux with books. Ronald Reagan—who appears rosy, robust, and cheerful—reads a volume entitled A Father's Book of Wisdom, and Nancy Reagan's paperback has a plaid cover and a quaint title: Life's Little Instruction Book.

As Judy Garland sings "I Can't Give You Anything but Love," Merv's chef, Jamie Fibiger, serves lunch (duck salad and Snapple Kiwi Strawberry Cocktail), and Merv phones his man Ronnie to arrange for his jet to take us to the Wickenburg dude ranch in Arizona for dinner.

"She had it all," he says of Garland. "She ripped you apart. Her voice went through the middle of your body. It came from her toes! Judy was expressing the desperation of her life up there on the stage. She was just out there, begging for them to help her, help her with her life.

"I was at her Carnegie Hall concert [in 1961], and at the party afterward I showed her my hands. They were beet red. And she said, 'Merv, what happened to your hands?' And I said, 'Judy! That's applause!' And she said, 'You were clapping that hard?!'"

From the time he was a boy in San Mateo, California, to his days touring the lower 48 states as a big-band singer, to his television era, Judy Garland was always Griffin's inspiration, his Platonic ideal as a performer. In his 1980 autobiography, Merv, Griffin writes, "Growing up I didn't miss one Judy Garland movie. Most of them I watched several times, crying when she cried, laughing when she laughed; I always thought one day I would go to Hollywood and marry her."

It didn't quite work out that way, but a choirboy from San Mateo can have his dreams. And Griffin did, all through his youth, which was, as he describes it in Merv, a kaleidoscope of Depression-era hardships (his parents, Mervyn senior, a tennis pro, and Rita, a housewife, lost their home to the bank) and proto–Andy Hardy wonderment.

"I was the P. T. Barnum and Billy Rose [of Eldorado Street]," Merv writes. "Every Saturday I had a show, recruiting all the kids on the block as either stagehands, actors, or audience, and sometimes as all three. I was the producer, always the producer.… My shows always had lavish openings and lavish closings, with very little attention paid to what came in the middle. The Barnum side of me created carnivals, complete with games, food stands, and cages made from boxes where the freakier-looking kids could be coaxed into imitating wild animals. Peggy Holitz was my leading lady and chief ticket taker; if she reported one of the kids to me for failing to pay the ticket, we'd start a little fire by his house and see that he got the blame. I always seemed as a child to be pulling open the curtains and waving my arms to start a show."

The very young Merv was something of a piano prodigy, though he had to keep his lessons a secret from his disapproving father. The adolescent Merv was vastly overweight (five feet nine inches and 240 pounds), and by the time he was in his late teens, Griffin's once thriving showbiz ego was far more fragile. He describes himself at 17 as a "rudderless … hunk of blubber," working as a clerk at the Crocker bank in San Mateo and occasionally playing the organ at church funerals.

"The country was at war," Griffin tells me as he feeds Patrick and Lobo strips of duck from his lunch plate. "I was walking down the train tracks near the house where we lived, wondering where my life was headed. I liked to feel the rush of air when the Daylight Express blasted by on its way south, toward Los Angeles and Hollywood. Then, suddenly, a voice came to me out of nowhere and said, 'You will never again be a private person.'

"Now, nothing was happening in my life to explain this feeling to me, but I felt something was going to happen. And I started to cry."

After this presentiment, Merv says, things started changing—almost miraculously—for the better: within a year, an audition for a job playing the piano at radio station KFRC in San Francisco led to a singing spot on a show with a 30-piece orchestra called San Francisco Sketchbook, which within two days was renamed The Merv Griffin Show. "I was making $1,100 a week, a kid with well-placed acne who they called 'America's New Romantic Singing Star.'"

Merv's acne, however, was just one of his remaining problems. He was still overweight, and whenever eager young women turned up at KFRC to seek the Romantic Singing Star's autograph, Griffin's bosses commanded him to hide. On one particularly humiliating day, when an admirer accidentally did get a glimpse of him, she turned on her heels and ran away, screeching with laughter.

Finally, in 1946, singer Joan Edwards, the host of Your Hit Parade, laid it on the line. "Merv, honey," she said, "you sing great, but the blubber has got to go!" Griffin went on a crash steak-and-salad diet and dropped 20 pounds a month until he hit 160. It was, he writes, "the first of one thousand two hundred forty-one diets."

4:00 p.m.

Merv's plane is in the hangar for repairs (the pilot hit a goose), so we are unable to go to Arizona for dinner. Instead, he decides to take the dogs and me on a twilight drive around Palm Springs in his white GMC Yukon.

As we set off across the 240-acre ranch, Merv drives by four circular guesthouses, which look a bit like Moroccan missile silos, each decorated in a different color scheme. Then we pass the enormous tile-roofed stable where 52 racehorses and Arabians are boarded and, next, a small house belonging to Tony Griffin. (Merv's 38-year-old son, his only child, was born during his father's 17-year marriage to Julann Griffin, which ended in 1976.) In the distance I can see Merv's new five-eighths-mile racetrack and the fanciful thatch-roofed viewing stand.

Cruising through the ranch gate onto a desert road lined with tall tamarisk trees, Griffin recalls his early trips—nearly 50 years ago—to the Palm Springs area, where he is now among the largest landowners. "Oh, in my day, Palm Springs was wonderful!" he says. "There was Charlie Farrell's Racquet Club, and you'd see stars like Dinah Shore, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor. Today the area is being revitalized. There are a lot of gay people—not wildness or anything, except on the night of their White Party, but they come in and fix up the houses and straighten the furniture."

When he first came here, in his 20s, Griffin was already a well-known singer who had headlined at the Cocoanut Grove. In 1950 a song he recorded called "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Cocoanuts" shot to No. 1 on the Hit Parade, and he became a bona fide sensation. One night, during an engagement at the Palladium in Hollywood, 6,000 people rushed the stage while he was singing, shouting, "We want 'Cocoanuts'!" There was even a Merv Griffin Fan Club, whose president, Merv writes in his book, was "a large-toothed girl with pigtails [named] Carol Burnett."

After his days with the Freddy Martin Orchestra, Griffin was briefly put under contract at Warner Bros., where he made a few forgettable pictures, including The Boy from Oklahoma, directed by Michael Curtiz, and So This Is Love, with Kathryn Grayson, but, because of his skills on the tennis court, he managed to ingratiate himself with the studio boss, Jack L. Warner. Once, the Colonel—as Warner liked to be called—invited "Griff" (as he liked to call Griffin) to the Beverly Hills Tennis Club to take part in a game of doubles in which the King of Thailand was playing. In one match, as a hard volley headed toward Merv, he was shocked to hear the famously profane Warner instruct him to "hit it to the Chink!"

"Oh, old Hollywood was so great," Merv says, steering the white Yukon down the desolate desert roads. "You felt like you were in the middle of something. It had style, a great look—and you could tell who the stars were. Not to quote Gloria Swanson, but 'they had faces then!' Boy, now you go out and you say, 'Is that Winona Ryder or is that Janeane Garofalo?' You can't tell who it is! But you know what my philosophy is? Turn the page. It's over. Move on."

Perhaps the most winning quality of The Merv Griffin Show was its deadpan, "pre-ironic" respect for—or, perhaps more accurately, unhealthy worship of—movie stars, TV stars, singers, authors, animal trainers, royalty. Anyone who had a good, or halfway decent, act. A long, long time before there was a People magazine or Hello! magazine or E! or Rosie O'Donnell, there was Merv, drilling deep into the bottomless well of America's Celebrity-Lust Reserve. Even into the MTV era, while David Letterman tore apart ingenues by late night, Griffin was still enthusiastically hosting Orson Welles (who met his maker two hours after an appearance), Bob Hope, George Burns, Sophia Loren, Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda, Steve and Eydie, Burt Reynolds, and on and on. Day after day—for 7,000 shows—Merv stared intently into the eyes of Celebrity X and uttered his signature "Oooooh!"—which, for the record, he says was actually "Ahhhhh!" It was, he says, "a wonderful way to let your interview know he was being successful."

"It was so fun doing a television show in those days, because the characters were so great and there was all that bizarreness," Griffin says with a certain wistfulness as he hangs a right onto posh Frank Sinatra Drive. "We had Andy Warhol, Ultra Violet, Abbie Hoffman, Genevieve—remember Genevieve?—Salvador Dalí, Tallulah Bankhead. Oh, Tallulah! She was a great friend of mine. She used to say, 'Darling Merv, I only do your show because you laugh with me, not at me.' She wouldn't do Carson, because he laughed at her. She was sooo quick—someone once asked her, 'Tallulah, do you think Johnnie Ray [a heartthrob singer of the 50s] was queer?' And she said, 'How should I know? He never sucked my dick!'

"Then, once, I had on Zsa Zsa Gabor and Pamela Mason, and the final guest was Hermione Gingold, who brought a dog with her. Well, I said, 'Hermione, you've never brought a dog on before!' And she said in her great English accent, 'Well, darling, I thought one more bitch wouldn't matter.'"

As we drive past Bob Hope's extraordinary flying-saucer-like house, high up on a hill, I ask why Merv stopped the show when he did. "The interviews just started to bore me," he says. "I couldn't bear facing another soap-opera star. Music was a no-no on TV—no ratings. And all the great guests had died. It was like Jack Paar said when he quit The Tonight Show: 'There was no one left to talk to.'"

As for today's talk-show hosts, Griffin says, "I laugh, 'Ha ha ha,' at Jay Leno and go 'Hmmmm' at David Letterman. Too much grimacing. Letterman is better when he's got someone on to do battle with. Rosie O'Donnell was born for talk shows. She's like a European movie star; she just says what's on her mind and lets the chips fall where they may."

On the rare occasion when he sees one of his own shows on videotape, he says, "It's like a different person. I almost never think about it unless someone else brings it up. And if I do see a clip, I look at myself on the screen and I really don't recognize the person up there."

Aboard Merv's Boat The Griff, Biscayne Bay: 2:00 p.m.

Merv's $7 million yacht, The Griff, which is 127 feet long (three decks, five staterooms, a Jacuzzi, and a crew of seven), is docked in Biscayne Bay off Miami Beach. On board with him are Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia; Kevin Deverich, the president of Merv Griffin Hotels; Warren Cowan, his publicist; and Ronnie Ward.

Last night Merv paid a visit to the Blue Moon hotel on Collins Avenue, which is about to undergo a renovation. Several people in the lobby asked for his autograph. Today he is being photographed for this article and meeting with his team of interior decorators to approve the Blue Moon's fabrics and finishes—the tasks quite obviously are among his favorite aspects of being a hotel baron.

In the dining room of the yacht, sitting at a huge snakeskin table (which is positioned in front of a giant painting of a leopard), Cowan, a bespectacled man with gray hair, is on the phone dictating a press release (intended for Liz Smith) about Merv's various businesses. "Everything Merv Griffin … the Singing Billionaire … touches these days turns to gold period His new Coconut Club, a supper-dance club in the Beverly Hilton, opened last month period As Merv predicted it has Californians back on their feet and dancing period The Coconut Club is the talk of Southern California parenthesis how come we don't have places to dance in New York question mark, parenthesis, paragraph Then there's Princess Elizabeth perfumes period Eight months ago Merv backed H.R.H. Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia with her new line of fragrances to be sold on QVC period Today Princess Elizabeth's fragrances are QVC's top seller exclamation point"

In the teakwood-lined sunroom, Merv reclines on a lemon-lime striped sofa, sipping a glass of his private-label Mont Merveilleux 1996 Sauvignon Blanc and talking on the phone to the C.E.O. of the Griffin Group, Larry Cohen, about his latest purchase: the St. Clerans manor house, an 18th-century Georgian estate in Galway, Ireland, that once belonged to John Huston (Merv reportedly paid $3 million for it). Across the room, on a rattan card table, the interior decorators Bob Rang and Diane Winovitch have carefully laid out dozens of swatches for Merv's inspection.

Soon, everyone—except Princess Elizabeth, who is curled up on a sectional sofa in the leopard room, listening to a Yugoslavian pop album—gathers around to watch Merv as he picks over every last thread that the designers have chosen for the hotel. Rang and Winovitch hover nervously as Merv focuses in on their selections: "No! I hate that—it's that ball again with the grapes," Merv says with some amount of passion as he flips through the swatches. "I just don't like mixtures of dark greens, blues, and reds. It just skews too old to me. I'm thinking less decadent-looking modern Art Deco. I'm thinking checkerboards, stripes. There's a heaviness about this fabric that dwarfs the rooms." Suddenly, he sees something he likes: "Ooooh, that's Key West casual!" he exclaims, causing looks of apparent relief to spread across the decorators' faces.

Next, Rang shows colors for the walls and floors. "Now, Merv, I know you like white bleached things—"

"Love it! Love it! Love it! Is that bleached? I love that," Merv says as, abruptly, his interest wanes. Backing off, he calls for a cigarette, which Ronnie lights, and another glass of Mont Merveilleux.

Settling into the lemon-lime couch, Griffin scans the travertine coffee table for his crossword puzzle. "Whenever I used to start into a puzzle," he says, "Eva and Ronnie used to look at each other and say, 'Wheeew! Let's go!' And they'd run out of the room."

Eva is the late Eva Gabor, his companion—on and off—for 15 years before she died of respiratory failure in 1995.

When Merv mentions Gabor, his face becomes slightly melancholy—an unusual countenance for him. Several days later, en route to Los Angeles on his jet, I ask him about Gabor and again he gets emotional. "Those years had great ups and downs," he tells me. "We really loved each other a lot, but sometimes we would leave each other and go to different people. She would go to someone else and I would go to [Princess] Elizabeth. We had broken up just before her death, but when we were together, we traveled everywhere: Morocco, all the islands. She sat every trip right where you are sitting now. Herb Caen [the late San Francisco Chronicle columnist] once said, 'If Merv and Eva ever stopped laughing they'd get married.' And now everyone says, 'God, we really miss the two of you.' We were like another version of Lucy and Desi."

Ronnie Ward feels that Merv and Eva might well have reunited. "It wouldn't have taken long, I don't think, if Eva hadn't passed away," he says. "The yacht would have brought them back together. She loved the water."

The reason for their split has long been unclear, and Merv says that at one time they had planned to be married. "I've never revealed this to anyone before," he confides, "but Nancy Reagan was going to be matron of honor. There was a pre-marital agreement," he continues. "But we could never agree which house we'd live in and I couldn't agree which of her staff she would bring with her and that really drove us apart. It's awful, because there is so much more I can't tell you. It was a monstrous problem and it wasn't mine—but I will never drag Eva's name through the mud."

4:00 p.m.

Warren Cowan grows agitated as Merv prepares to be photographed in his Jacuzzi-at-sea. The venerable public-relations pioneer doesn't think that his client should get into a hot tub for a photographer. In a last-ditch effort to prevent this from taking place, the publicist writes an urgent note to Merv on a pink tablet: no jacuzzi!! (thrice underlined). However, Merv ignores the entreaty, which is held in front of his face, and heads downstairs. Having lost the battle, Cowan now scrawls another note on the pink tablet. This new missive is intended for me—a suggested headline for this article. Removing the piece of paper from the pad, he crosses the sunroom and discreetly slips it into my palm. It reads: it's a mervelous world!

The Beverly Hilton, Merv's Mother Ship: 5:00 p.m.

Merv's apartment is on the eighth floor of the Beverly Hilton, a blocky, chalk-white concrete leviathan at the corner of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevards—the busiest intersection in the world. We are standing on the living-room terrace with all of Los Angeles spread before us. It is breezy. Dusk. The sky is unusually clear, and the clustered skyscrapers of downtown stand out like Emerald City on the horizon.

"I want to show you something," Merv says, pointing northward, toward Benedict Canyon. "That's my hilltop that I just sold to Mark Hughes of Herbalife [the nutritional-supplement company] for eight or nine million. One hundred and fifty-seven acres. I bought it from the Shah of Iran's sister Princess Shams," who had intended it to be the site of the Peacock Throne in exile. Griffin's dream for the hilltop had been to build a 60,000-square-foot Palladian villa—along with stables, a helicopter pad, and three lakes. But the project never got off the drawing board. "I was swatched to death, so I called it off," Merv says, moving toward his bright-yellow living room and taking a seat at his piano. He plays a soft, slow medley of songs he has composed—the themes to The Merv Griffin Show, Wheel of Fortune, and Jeopardy.

This year marks Griffin's 11th anniversary as owner of the Beverly Hilton, his first big acquisition after the windfall sale of 1986.

About a year later, Griffin entered a bidding war against Donald Trump for Resorts International Hotels and Casinos "because I wanted to try to build a chain of hotels quickly."

Griffin won the bidding war, but had to restructure the debt of Resorts International twice in order to keep the giant company afloat. (Donald Trump called it "Chapter 22.") Griffin was forced into a kind of indentured servitude to the Resorts chain—which includes the flagship in Atlantic City and the popular Paradise Island resorts in the Bahamas—"using my public persona to move the company along.

"I tried everything from live game shows to celebrity appearances, even giving away $1,500 bags of money in the casinos," he says. "People turned around and spent it on blackjack!"

A Saturday Night Live sketch at the time summed it up, depicting Merv starring in a Resorts International floor show while waiting tables, parking cars, taking reservations, and doing hotel laundry.

In December 1996, after pulling the company into the black, Griffin merged Resorts with Sol Kerzner's Sun International Hotels. The deal made Griffin a major stockholder of Sun International, a $1.5 billion company, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange at around $47 a share.

7:00 p.m.

Marguerita, Merv's Beverly Hilton maid, tidies up around the already immaculate apartment as Merv sips coffee in his small bleached-wood-paneled den. The sun is about to set over the Pacific, and the lighting is burnt orange. We are listening to some tunes from 50 years ago: Merv singing "Cotton Candy and a Toy Balloon" (co-written by Steve Allen) with the Freddy Martin Orchestra. "This is Merv Griffin and the Martin Men!" says an NBC announcer on the scratchy recording. Then the young Merv comes on, singing in a voice pitched higher than his current one. "I don't bottom out, but it's a similar voice," he observes.

Later tonight, Griffin will sing "Just in Time" at the Coconut Club in a trio with Jerry Vale and Steve Guttenberg. Later this year, he will release his first album in 20 years, which is being produced in part by David Foster, the man behind many Whitney Houston and Barbra Streisand ventures. "It's music for very late at night, and it's all personal, all mood," Merv says, clearly excited, as he gets up to pop in his favorite track.

On the tape, his voice is smooth and clear and sounds very youthful. According to Mort Lindsey, musical director of The Merv Griffin Show for 20 years, "Merv is singing better than he's ever sung before. This may be due to the fact that he's got a little more weight on his frame. You know, Pavarotti's no sylph!"

As the love song continues, Griffin lights a cigarette and sinks into his pink plaid easy chair. The lyrics to "Like Someone in Love," by Johnny Burke, make his blue eyes grow misty. Biting his right thumbnail, he cradles his chin in his left hand and looks out the window toward the Emerald City. Wisps of cigarette smoke eddy around his head.

As I watch him here, in the umber twilight of 90210, something that his very close friend Robert Loggia told me comes to mind: "On a moment when Merv is unaware—let's say he might be sitting looking out at the sunset and you come upon him—he is unaware of your arrival, and the face seems to be sad. Not morose, but a deep sadness, which, of course, inclines you to say, 'What's the matter?'

"Then, when Merv knows you're there, that changes, and he's right back on it. I think he's lonely. I think Merv is very, very lonely.